block: Avoid unecessary drv->bdrv_getlength() calls

The block layer generally keeps the size of an image cached in
bs->total_sectors so that it doesn't have to perform expensive
operations to get the size whenever it needs it.

This doesn't work however when using a backend that can change its size
without qemu being aware of it, i.e. passthrough of removable media like
CD-ROMs or floppy disks. For this reason, the caching is disabled when a
removable device is used.

It is obvious that checking whether the _guest_ device has removable
media isn't the right thing to do when we want to know whether the size
of the host backend can change. To make things worse, non-top-level
BlockDriverStates never have any device attached, which makes qemu
assume they are removable, so drv->bdrv_getlength() is always called on
the protocol layer. In the case of raw-posix, this causes unnecessary
lseek() system calls, which turned out to be rather expensive.

This patch completely changes the logic and disables bs->total_sectors
caching only for certain block driver types, for which a size change is
expected: host_cdrom and host_floppy on POSIX, host_device on win32; also
the raw format in case it sits on top of one of these protocols, but in
the common case the nested bdrv_getlength() call on the protocol driver
will use the cache again and avoid an expensive drv->bdrv_getlength()
call.

Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/block/block_int.h b/include/block/block_int.h
index a48731d..1666066 100644
--- a/include/block/block_int.h
+++ b/include/block/block_int.h
@@ -156,8 +156,11 @@ struct BlockDriver {
 
     const char *protocol_name;
     int (*bdrv_truncate)(BlockDriverState *bs, int64_t offset);
+
     int64_t (*bdrv_getlength)(BlockDriverState *bs);
+    bool has_variable_length;
     int64_t (*bdrv_get_allocated_file_size)(BlockDriverState *bs);
+
     int (*bdrv_write_compressed)(BlockDriverState *bs, int64_t sector_num,
                                  const uint8_t *buf, int nb_sectors);